Реклама и Дизайнhttps://maxon.net/ru_RU.utf8MAXONSat, 25 May 2019 13:24:56 +0000Sat, 25 May 2019 13:24:56 +0000TYPO3 EXT:newsnews-6904Tue, 19 Dec 2017 10:06:07 +0000A Gaming Experience Like No Otherhttps://maxon.net/ru/industrii/reklama-i-dizain/xbox-one-x-trailer/Blind explains pixel threading and other aspects of the Xbox One X release trailer.news-6446Thu, 27 Jul 2017 08:39:29 +0000Audio Creatureshttps://maxon.net/ru/novosti/case-studies/reklama-i-dizain/article/audio-creatures/Tim Clapham and Mike Tosetto explain how Luxx helped Director Ash Bolland turn the Sydney Opera House into a natural wonder for Vivid Live 2017. Every summer, the Vivid festival briefly transforms Sydney into an enchanting wonderland of light, color and music. At the center of the event is Lighting the Sails, the Sydney Opera House’s tradition of turning its unique architecture, which resembles sails or shells, into a breathtaking canvas.

This year’s Lighting the Sails production, Audio Creatures, was directed by Sydney’s Ash Bolland with soundscapes by renowned Brazilian sound designer Amon Tobin. The elaborate projection-mapped show, which required 16 projectors, reflects Bolland’s interest in the relationship between nature and humans and offers viewers a glimpse of abstract creatures, otherworldly plants and a futuristic chrome world.

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Tim Clapham, creative director of Luxx, a Sydney-based motion graphics and 3D animation studio, says Luxx was very privileged to be invited by Spinifex Group to create visuals for Audio Creatures. Working with Mike Tosetto, creative director of Sydney motion design studio Never Sit Still, and using Cinema 4D, After Effects, V-Ray and X-Particles as well as custom code, Luxx collaborated with Spinifex to create about 8 minutes of the 15-minute production in seven weeks.

Clapham: It was a huge honor to be asked to do this. It gets millions and millions of views, and is probably the most viewed projection mapping in the world. It was a once- in-a-lifetime opportunity to do this. We had a couple of other great artists working with us and everybody put their all into it. You could tell people really knew it was a privilege. The Spinifex Group and Ash Bolland approached Luxx independently to collaborate on the project. It was a wonderful coincidence and great to know that both the production company and the director had plenty of faith in our abilities. The project was pretty vast and Luxx produced around eight minutes of the 3D content, all rendered at 4K. That’s a lot of material to create in seven weeks, which required many long days and nights to craft.

What kind of direction did you get from Ash Bolland?

Clapham: Ash gave great direction and was a pleasure to work with. He had some very specific ideas but he was open to our interpretations, too. If there was a cool way to execute his concept, he was open to that. Ash also had some wonderful references for how he thought the creatures should look, and it was our job to interpret them. He created style frames for each creature, some montaged in Photoshop using 3D renders, and others were hand-drawn sketches. We worked together to rebuild those fantastic creatures in Cinema 4D.

Tosetto: He wanted the creatures to feel big and heavy, like Godzilla stomping through a city. The opera house is huge, and the creatures needed to convey weight through slow and substantial movement.

What kinds of creatures did you make?

Clapham: We built many of the creatures and components, including a butterfly, a chrysalis, a jellyfish, ice pods, an octopus, parasites, shells and a magnetic core. Each creature presented its own unique challenge. One shot in particular starts with a chrysalis tearing open to reveal a butterfly. Ash wanted to reveal the butterfly’s wings as individual segments from the wing patters. We ran Cloth simulations on each segment, creating flags flapping in the wind as they unfurl to reveal the butterfly wings.

Talk about the challenges of getting everything to fit on the opera house’s sails.

Clapham: The opera house’s sails are an incredible canvas but it is quite an unusual shape, kind of like pieces of an orange. We needed the animation to be constrained within that shape so it didn’t break out and kill the illusion. We had a 3D model of the opera house and the hero projection in position but we needed to make sure all of the elements fit perfectly. We did a lot with deformers in C4D, and also used reshaping tools in After Effects to ensure everything was pixel perfect to the shape.

We explored multiple avenues in Cinema, which gave us the flexibility to experiment with the ideas we had. For example, when we were working on the magnetic core, which is more like geometry and swirling shapes than a creature, we thought it was going to be a simple shot but it turned out to be really challenging. We used a custom Python Effector that allowed us to arrange objects using the Fibonnaci sequence. [A series of numbers wherein the next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it.]

Describe the projection setup for this?

Tosetto: The projections were split into four separate parts and projected all the way across the harbor. Four projectors were used for the two sails on the left, six projectors for the center sail, three projectors for the right sail and three projectors for the two smaller sales for a total of 16.

What did you think when you saw it actually being projected?

Clapham: Ash really had a crazy vision. He walks though life seeing things most of us take for granted but he stops and looks and sees so much beauty in nature and he sees how some creatures are almost like alien beings. Watching this, I thought the creatures felt really accessible, abstract and beautiful. We went out on a limb with this because the whole subject matter is abstract and bizarre but we kept it fun and light-hearted with creatures that aren’t spiky and aggressive, but kind of fluffy and bouncy.

]]>news-6058Mon, 20 Feb 2017 10:15:23 +0000Power Toolshttps://maxon.net/ru/novosti/case-studies/reklama-i-dizain/article/power-tools/Panoply employs a combination of Cinema 4D, Arnold and Houdini to successfully evoke the brand values of Mercedes-BenzTo showcase the production of the latest Mercedes-Benz cars, RAID Films and Atelier Markgraph approached Panoply – a design and motion studio based in London. The brief was to produce the first installment in a series of films representing five brand values: safety, perfection, quality, precision and awakening. The film will be shown daily at three major Mercedes-Benz Visitors Centers for the next two years.

The four-person team at Panoply had three months to generate the film, which employs a mixture of photoreal renders of elements of the car combined with a mixture of abstract imagery to express the themes of the brief. The version seen here is the 'Director's Cut' – a shorter version of the piece that includes abstract imagery that didn't make it into the final edit.

One of the team's biggest challenges was handling the massive data sets of the automotive CAD data. The models are incredibly detailed as they are used by machines for manufacturing the cars. But while this detail is very impressive, the models aren't optimized for visualization purposes in 3D animation applications like Cinema 4D.

"I think the most memorable thing from the production of this project was near the beginning when we received the CAD models for the Mercedes-Benz car," says Mark Lindner, director at Panoply. "We opened the raw triangulated meshes and were amazed at the amount of detail we had to work with but also quite worried when we thought about the amount of cleanup that would be required in order to make use of them. Luckily we didn't have to sort every single mesh we were sent. It was a case of composing our shots how we wanted them after which, once we had the shot signed off, we would go in and retopologize only the mesh that was visible."

Cinema 4D's Polygon Pen tool was vital during the retopology phase, acknowledges Lindner. "It allowed us to quickly and painlessly reduce the super-high-density CAD models down to a fraction of their polygon count without losing any detail."

To facilitate this workflow, the team also relied on Cinema 4D's XRefs, enabling them to animate using low-res proxy models and then swap in denser versions at render time. "Due to the sheer number of polygons in the high-resolution versions we didn't retopologize everything from the beginning. We used placeholder meshes in order to do our animations then once we had a locked shot we would then only retopologize the mesh that would be visible in the frame."

To achieve the render look the studio was after, Panoply turned to the physically-based renderer, Arnold. "We've been using Arnold for over two years now," says Lindner. "We first used it with Houdini before it came to Cinema 4D. However, we've mostly been using it with Cinema 4D for the last 18 months. The level of support has been key in keeping us using the render engine. That, coupled with the incredible number of data-heavy scenes you can throw at it without it even flinching, has been vital to our workflow here."

The Mercedes-Benz film opens with a moody industrial setting, which was built and rendered in 3D. "From this environment we created a high-resolution HDRI render using the spherical camera in Arnold," explains Lindner. "This then served as our HDRI for a lot of the other shots through the sequence. Additional lights in each shot were created using area lights with high-resolution soft box textures to give them an uneven look."

There then follows a montage of abstract sequences, aimed at encapsulating the brand values outlined above. The metallic atom array mesh was achieved using dynamics to create a crumpled version of the structure. The team then blended between the point positions on this version and the uncrumpled original using the Pose Morph tag and a Plain Effector. A slight mesh wobble was added using Cinema 4D's Jiggle Deformer. "Using the Pose Morph tag in combination with the Pose Deformer and MoGraph effectors allows for an amazing level of customization of effects," adds Lindner.

An array of realistic-looking laser beams are simply spotlights with high intensity and narrow angle of influence. They were then rendered using Arnold's atmospheric scattering to give the team the visual effect they were after.

For the more abstract simulations, Panoply turned to SideFX Houdini. "Houdini was used quite extensively during this project," states Lindner,"while all of the rendering was done within Cinema 4D. This meant that we'd need to transfer everything between the programs using heavy Alembic files. All of the abstract animations, particles, ball bearing sorting and liquids were done in Houdini."

The first such example is the wind tunnel smoke trails that swirl around an invisible sphere. "This was created using a line of smoke emitters with a velocity field pushing the volume in one direction. With all turbulence and displacements turned off for the smoke it was a simple case of just putting our collision sphere in place and then making it invisible to the camera at render time."

After some sumptuous shots of car bodywork being fitted together there's a brief sequence showing material being dissolved away. "This was created using a high-resolution displacement texture," explains Lindner, "which was then blended to an alternative shader using the mix node in Arnold. The additional particles floating upwards were created in Houdini, then brought back into Cinema 4D as an Alembic point cloud for rendering."

A brief segment of rippling fluids was also created in Houdini using its FLIP Solver and VDB skinning. A sequence of fluid meshes was generated, which were then loaded into Cinema 4D as a VDB sequence for rendering. Houdini was also responsible for the collection of metal spheres that coalesce into a neat Fibonacci spiral.

When the car's Start button is pressed, it ignites a TRON-style data network, representing the electronic brains of the vehicle. These were created in Houdini using geometry: "We created a procedural system into which we could input any mesh and then generate the line animations. This was made to be highly controllable so we avoided using any dynamics – it allowed us to accurately move hundreds of lines exactly where we wanted them in synchronization."

The quality of the end result is a testament to the ease with which the differing strengths of Cinema 4D, Arnold and Houdini could be combined into a powerful toolset. "Cinema 4D's openness in regards to working flawlessly with Arnold and Houdini was invaluable to our workflow," declares Lindner.Steve Jarratt is a long-time CG enthusiast and technology journalist based in the UK.All images courtesy of Panoply.Panoply Website:www.panoply.co.uk ]]>news-5458Mon, 19 Sep 2016 08:48:26 +0000Kaspersky Lab Advertising Imageshttps://maxon.net/ru/novosti/case-studies/reklama-i-dizain/article/translate-to-russian-kaspersky-lab-advertising-images/Kaspersky Labs hired visual effects studio Resight to create illustrations for its IT security products and Cinema 4D was the perfect tool for the job!Security in and of itself is an abstract concept and IT security even more. Not many people can actually picture what IT security is, which is why Andrey Voytisin saw himself confronted with a unique challenge: visualizing the concept of IT security. Kaspersky Lab’s basic idea consisted of using images to symbolize the environment of modern communication, production technology, Cloud and data exchange. As different as these topics may sound, they each represent different aspects of modern technology and also illustrate that everything really is ‘connected with everything else’. The goal of the illustrations was to show customers how these connected situations require comprehensive security measures to protect them.

Stylistically, the illustrations had to resemble science fiction or cyberpunk and be reminiscent of films such as ‘Matrix’ and the color palette had to give a clear impression of computer graphics. Resight worked closely with the client to refine the look of the images. Resight had sent Kaspersky Labs concept illustrations from very early on in the project. As soon as the arrangement in the images was defined, Resight started with modeling and texturing. “We modeled everything in Cinema 4D because we had all the tools we needed in a single application,” explains Andrey and adds, “The only feature we didn’t need for these models was the Sculpt feature!”

Each illustration took about two weeks to complete, which not only included modeling, texturing and rendering but also fine-tuning all details together with the client. “The work on the images often started with pencil sketches on paper, which gave substance to the respective idea. The 3D elements were then created based on this illustration,” continues Andrey.

“Many customers clamor to a particular concept, which for them becomes written in stone. Very often, however, new ideas crystalize during the completion process. Fortunately, Kaspersky Labs understands this process and was willing to accept new ideas if they like them. It was a pleasure working with Kaspersky Labs,” says Andrey laughing.

The final step in the 3D production process was the rendering, which was done using Otoy’s Octane Renderer. The images were rendered in several passes, which were then each loaded into Photoshop and combined. This made it possible to fine-tune details or to adjust or change colors where necessary.

The illustrations that Resight created for Kaspersky Labs show that Cinema 4D is an excellent tool for creating a wide range of illustration styles. Artists with Cinema 4D in their toolset are definitely well-equipped to meet any creative challenge they encounter!